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After 22 days, multiple candidacies, and much tumult, the United States House of Representatives at long last elected a speaker on October 25. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is a good man, a good choice, and will be a good speaker—and Americans can have confidence that the Republican House majority has the leadership that it needs.
The qualities and record of the new speaker have been much discussed in media, and I will not belabor them here except to note that in my own work in Washington, D.C., both in the Trump White House and in the policy world, I have found Rep. Johnson to be consistently principled and indefatigably optimistic. You can't ask for much more from an officeholder or an American. What deserves a spotlight now is less the man and more the process: what it means that it took so long to get here, and that this whole 22-day episode happened at all.
Conventional wisdom in D.C. and the media—even among many enthusiasts for the new speaker—is that the whole affair was proof of a broken House majority, a Republican Party unable to govern, and a conservative movement unwilling to coalesce for the necessary work of leading the country. Look left, look right, and look to nearly any public thinker or member of the commentariat, and you see the same analysis. Even if one likes Mike Johnson as speaker of the House, the process by which he ascended is deplored and assumed to be a net negative for his party and movement.
This is an understandable view in a couple of senses. The frustration of officeholders and staff in the House is genuinely comprehensible—and they have my empathy as a veteran of more than one high-stakes passage in federal governance. The 22 days of interregnum was historically unprecedented, and in an institution that leans heavily upon process and precedence, the impulse toward dismay and pessimism was strong. Charity demands we acknowledge it.
The common reaction to the speaker election process was also understandable given the media's own perennial incomprehension of events. This is not the occasion for an extended critique of the media establishment—which mostly generates that critique just fine on its own—but I will note here that one of its serial failures is its inability to grasp substantive issues of principle, policy, and ideology. Too many D.C. scribes cover elections, including this one, as horse races or transactional events centered upon personality and material advantages. Of course both frameworks are useful and real, but focusing on them exclusively creates a false appearance of wisdom and perceptiveness. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the destiny of man is not strictly a material computation—and that includes the men and women in our Congress.
So here's a counter-narrative on the speaker race, which I propose not because it's a novel interpretation, but because I believe it is the core truth of the episode: there were real issues at stake, and the process took so long because the gravity and inevitability of those issues required exceptional discernment, deliberation, and debate. We therefore must understand this speaker's race not primarily as a personal popularity contest—nor even a cautionary tale of a minority faction's ability to sow chaos—but as a substantive and extended debate on the actual issues facing our nation.
Those who cannot conceive of governance as anything but the mechanistic working of institutions—which is to say, nearly everyone in D.C. and the media—will recoil from this. But they do so because they have largely lost sight of what and who governance is for. The purpose of government is not to secure the workings of government. The purpose of government in America is to defend the interests of the American people, first and foremost our liberties. This perspective passes for radicalism now, but in every generation of Americans in the preceding two and a half centuries, it was mere common sense.
So, keeping in mind what our federal government, and especially our Congress, is actually for, we can see this extended speaker selection process in a very different light. What is cast as a failure of the House, of Republicans, and of conservatives is instead properly understood as exactly the conversation that institution, that party, and that movement need to have. That conversation unfolded in public and private across 22 days: on taxes, on spending, on entitlements, on war, on peace, on the defense of family, on our cities, on our farms, and beyond. It unfolded, a variety of individuals—each bearers of a particular prescription and approach to all these issues—stepped forth, and eventually one acceptable to all the rest won.
This man, this new speaker, did not win merely as himself or by virtue of his own name. He won as the bearer of a particular set of policies, of principles, and of priorities that are themselves the outcome of the sort of vigorous debate that is a signal not of dissolution and disarray, but of strength and vigor. That's what gets missed, but it is what you and I absolutely should not miss. There was a conversation at length—one delayed, one long overdue—and one set of views persuaded all the others.
You'll look in vain for similar energy and classically American disputations on the other side of the aisle.
The new speaker is here and America will benefit from his leadership. But remember this: how he got here was not, contrary to every other voice you'll hear on the topic, a regrettable episode. It was a necessity, and the majority that made it happen is the stronger for it.
Brooke Leslie Rollins, President and CEO of America First Policy Institute
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
